Showing papers in "Animal Behaviour in 2012"

TL;DR: These guidelines are general in scope, since the diversity of species and the study techniques used in behavioural research preclude the inclusion of prescriptive standards for animal care and treatment, other than emphasizing the general principle that the best animal welfare is a prerequisite for the best science.

TL;DR: The self-domestication hypothesis provides a plausible account of the origin of numerous differences between bonobos and chimpanzees, and note that many of these appear to have arisen as incidental by-products rather than adaptations.

TL;DR: Evidence is reviewed from humans and animals that IIV can vary in important ways across individuals and that individual differences in IIV may be related to differences in performance, and how to measure IIV when behaviour systematically changes over a series of observations is shown.

TL;DR: Results do not support the hypothesis that energy is the key proximate currency mediating the costs of immunity, and there are some indications that oxidative stress can be an important currency that could mediate both short-term and long-term costs of immune system activation, although direct evidence is so far limited.

TL;DR: A growing number of studies ask whether and how bird songs vary between areas with low versus high levels of anthropogenic noise as discussed by the authors and find that birds are seen to sing at higher frequencies in urban versus rural populations, presumably because of selection for higher-pitched songs in the face of low-frequency urban noise.

TL;DR: In a study of wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta, the authors found that male innovators were particularly prone to solve novel problems, and females persisted longer than other group members when interacting with tasks as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use a social network perspective to demonstrate a property of transitivity in random directed networks (on average, three-fourths of complete triads are transitive) and show that empirical dominance networks are often significantly more transitive than random networks.

TL;DR: The authors found that threat-directed behaviours did not reflect individual boldness, but instead were indicative of another personality dimension: anxiety, and stress the value of using multiple assays to measure the personality trait of interest.

TL;DR: The observed grouping patterns not only resulted from passive aggregations for specific resources, but rather the communities developed from an active choice of individuals as a sign of sociability, suggesting that a stable grouping strategy may confer substantial benefits in this marine predator.

TL;DR: It is shown that ambient temperature affected fine-scale behavioural decisions of moose with consequences for forage accessibility, especially during summer, and the limiting effect of ambient temperature (cold and high) on animal behaviour is likely to increase, potentially influencing individual fitness and population dynamics.

TL;DR: This review takes a brief step back from addressing the question of evolutionary origins of prosocial behaviour in order to identify contextual factors that are contributing to variation in the expression of prossocial behaviour and hindering progress towards identifying phylogenetic patterns.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors found that boldness towards a novel object predicts risk taking in a foraging task and that individual differences in risk taking were repeatable and repeatability increased with increasing risk.

TL;DR: The incorporation of frontline interactions in empirical and theoretical investigations of brood parasite–host arms races are advocated to provide a more holistic understanding of the coevolutionary processes in these systems.

TL;DR: It is suggested that studies that trap animals for laboratory assessments of personality may consistently underrepresent the extent of personality trait variation in the populations that they sample, and recommend that future studies either develop methods for testing personality in the field that control for obvious confounding variables or make every effort to ensure minimum bias when sampling animals for use in a laboratory setting.

TL;DR: A long-term data set is used to examine the relationship between food availability and social network structure in the endangered southern resident killer whales and finds a significant relationship between the connectivity of the social network and salmon abundance, with a more interconnected social network in years of high salmon abundance.

TL;DR: The numerical abilities of three American black bears investigated by presenting discrimination tasks on a touch-screen computer were similar to that found previously with monkeys, and suggests that bears may also show other forms of sophisticated quantitative abilities.

TL;DR: The results show that an individual’s reproductive fitness can be associated with behavioural variations in boldness and aggressiveness.

TL;DR: To determine whether tool use varied in relation to food availability in bearded capuchin monkeys, anvil and stone hammer use was recorded in two sympatric wild groups, and climatic variables and availability of fruits, invertebrates and palm nuts were assessed.

TL;DR: It is shown that European storm petrels, Hydrobates pelagicus, are able to distinguish kin from nonkin odours, and this results suggest that sophisticated olfactory communication is relevant in birds, and leads to important behavioural traits such as philopatry.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed 15 years of data on intergroup encounters, party composition, ranging and feeding behavior in the Kanyawara community of chimpanzees, Kibale National Park, Uganda.

TL;DR: It is more common for these vocalizations to reflect arousal rather than additionally providing specific referential information about the feeding event, and at this point, there is no compelling hypothesis to explain the evolution of functionally referentially food-associated calls.

TL;DR: Evidence is found that horses show visual lateralization, as in other vertebrates, not dependent on handling by humans, and limb preference during grazing, by contrast, does appear to depend on experience.

TL;DR: The results show personality differences in performance in learning flexibility in only the apparently most difficult stage, yet in opposite directions for males and females, which reveal behavioural and cognitive mechanisms that may underlie observed sex- and personality-dependent fitness differences in natural populations.

TL;DR: Bottom-up approaches to analyses of social structure treat pairwise interactions as the fundamental unit of analysis and social structure as an emergent property rather than relying on a priori assignments of species as units of association, which will collectively provide a richer description of the evolution and function of mixed-species societies.

TL;DR: Comparisons of patterns of sociality among bottlenose dolphins in Moreton Bay across two periods suggest that their social structure represents a complex adaptive system that is resilient to disturbance.

TL;DR: It is concluded that predation might represent an important force selecting for sociality in chestnut-crowned babblers, and the need for future studies to consider more explicitly inherent benefits to group living in the evolution of vertebrate cooperative breeding systems is highlighted.

TL;DR: It is suggested that release from predation and change in predator community associated with urbanization has altered the antipredator behaviour of birds colonizing towns and cities.

TL;DR: The results show that chipmunks display individual behavioural variation and that these differences may have physiological implications over long periods in natural settings, and future studies should investigate the fitness consequences of such behavioural/physiological differences.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the degree of behavioural plasticity versus personality in the bridge spider, Larinioides sclopetarius, which occurs in extremely high densities in urban areas over the Holarctic.